by Richard Ford
Only for Phyllis’s particular distress and dismay I have no antidote, except to wish for a kinder world. It hardly counts.
“The whole country seems in a mess to me, Frank. We really can’t afford to live in Vermont, if you want to know the truth. But now we can’t live down here either. And with my health concerns, we need to put down some roots.” Phyllis sniffs, as if the tears she’s been fighting have retreated. “I’m riding a hormonal roller coaster today. I’m sorry. I just see everything black.”
“I don’t think things are that bad, Phyllis. I think, for instance, this is a good house with good value, just the way I’ve said, and you and Joe would be happy here, and so would Sonja, and you’d never worry about your neighbors at all. No one knows his neighbors in the suburbs anyway. It’s not like Vermont.” I peek down at my listing sheet to see if there’s anything new and diverting I can stress: “fplc,” “gar/cpt,” “lndry,” priced right at 155K. Solid value considerations but nothing to bring the hormonal roller coaster into the station.
I gaze in puzzlement at her ill-defined posterior and have a sudden, fleeting curiosity about, of all things, her and Joe’s sex life. Would it be jolly and jokey? Prayerful and restrained? Rowdy, growling and obstreperous? Phyllis has an indefinite milky allure that is not always obvious—encased and bundled as she is, and slightly bulge-eyed in her fitless, matron-designer clothes—some yielding, unmaternal abundance that could certainly get a rise out of some lonely PTA dad in corduroys and a flannel shirt, encountered by surprise in the chilly intimacy of the grade-school parking lot after parents’ night.
The truth is, however, we know little and can find out precious little more about others, even though we stand in their presence, hear their complaints, ride the roller coaster with them, sell them houses, consider the happiness of their children—only in a flash or a gasp or the slam of a car door to see them disappear and be gone forever. Perfect strangers.
And yet, it is one of the themes of the Existence Period that interest can mingle successfully with uninterest in this way, intimacy with transience, caring with the obdurate uncaring. Until very recently (I’m not sure when it stopped) I believed this was the only way of the world; maturity’s balance. Only more things seem to need sorting out now: either in favor of complete uninterest (ending things with Sally might be an example) or else going whole hog (not ending things with Sally might be another example).
“You know, Frank …” Her misty moment past, Phyllis has walked by me into the Houlihans’ living room, stepped to the front window beside a little leafed butler’s table and, just like the redhead across the street, pulled open the drapes, letting in a warm, midmorning light, which defeats the room’s funeral stillness by causing its fussy couches and feminine mint dishes, its antimacassars and polished knickknacks (all of which Ted has left sentimentally in place), to seem to shine from within. “I was just standing there thinking that maybe no one gets the house they want.” Phyllis glances around the room in an interested, friendly way, as if she liked the new light but thought the furniture needed rearranging.
“Well, if I can find it for them they do. And if they can afford it. You are best off coming as close as you can and trying to bring life to a place, not just depending on the place to supply it for you.” I give her my own version of a willing smile. This is a positive sign, though of course we’re not really addressing each other now; we’re merely setting forth our points of view, and everything depends on whose act is better. It is a form of strategizing pseudo-communication I’ve gotten used to in the realty business. (Real talk—the kind you have with a loved one such as your former wife back when you were her husband—real talk is out of the question.)
“Do you have a prison behind your house?” Phyllis says bluntly. She gazes at her toes, which are pinched into her sandals, their nails painted scarlet. They seem to imply something to her.
“No, but I do live in my ex-wife’s former house,” I say, “and I live alone, and my son’s an epileptic who has to wear a football helmet all day, and I’ve decided to live in her house just to give him a little semblance of continuity when he comes to visit, since his life expectancy’s not so great. So I’ve made some adjustments to necessity.” I blink at her. This is about her, not about me.
Phyllis was not expecting this, and looks stunned, suddenly acknowledging how much everything up to now has been usual salesmanship, usual aggravating clienthood; but that now everything is suddenly down to it: her and Joe’s actual situation being attended to diligently by a man with even bigger woes than they have, who sleeps less well, visits more physicians, has more worrisome phone calls, during which he spends more anxious time on hold while gloomy charts are being read, and whose life generally matters more than theirs by his being closer to the grave (not necessarily his own).
“Frank, I don’t mean to compare wounds with bruises,” Phyllis says abjectly. “I’m sorry. I’m just feeling a lot of pressure along with everything else.” She gives me a sad Stan Laurel smile and lowers her chin just like old Stan. Her face, I see, is a malleable and sweet putty face, perfect for alternative children’s theater in the Northeast Kingdom. But no less right for Penns Neck, where a thespian group she might head up could do Peter Pan or The Fantasticks (minus the “Rape” song) for the lonely, sticky-fingered ex-comptrollers and malpractitioners across the fence, leaving them with at least a temporary feeling that life isn’t all that ruined, that there’s still hope on the outside, that there are a lot of possibilities left—even if there aren’t.
I hear Ted and Joe scraping their damp dogs on the back steps, then stamping the welcome mat and Joe saying, “Now that’d be a real reality check, I’ll tell you,” while gentle, clever Ted says, “I’ve just decided for the time I have left, Joe, to let go all the nonessentials.”
“I envy that, don’t think I don’t,” Joe says. “Boy-oh-boy, I could get rid of some of those, all right.”
Phyllis and I both hear this. Each of us knows that one of us is the first nonessential Joe would like to put behind him.
“Phyllis, I figure we’ve all got scars and bruises,” I say, “but I just don’t want them to cause you to miss a damn good deal on a wonderful house when it’s in your grasp here.”
“Is there anything else we can see today?” Phyllis says dispiritedly.
I sway back slightly on my heels, arms enfolding my clipboard. “I could show you a new development.” I’m thinking of Mallards Landing, of course, where slash is smoldering and maybe two units are finished and the Markhams will go out of their gourds the minute they lay eyes on the flapping pennants. “The young developer’s a heck of a good guy. They’re all in your range. But you indicated you didn’t want to consider new homes.”
“No,” Phyllis says darkly. “You know, Frank, Joe’s a manic-depressive.”
“No, I didn’t know that.” I hug my clipboard tighter. (I’m beginning to cook like a cabbage in my windbreaker.) I mean, though, to hold my ground. Manic-depressives, convicted felons, men and women with garish tattoos over every inch of their skin: all are entitled to a hook to hang their hats on if they’ve got the scratch. This claim for Joe’s looniness is probably a complete lie, a ploy to let me know she’s a worthy opponent in the realty struggle (for some reason her female troubles still seem legit). “Phyllis, you and Joe need to do some serious thinking about this house.” I stare profoundly into her obstinate blue eyes, which I realize for the first time must have contacts, since no blue nearly similar to that occurs in nature.
She is framed by the window, her small hands clasped in front like a schoolmarm lording a trick question over a schoolboy dunce. “Do you feel sometimes”—the light glowing around Phyllis seems to have brought her in contact with the forces of saintliness—“that no one’s looking out for you anymore?” She smiles faintly. The creases at the corners of her mouth make weals in her cheeks.
“Every day.” I try to beam back a martyrish look.
�
�I had that feeling when I got married the first time. When I was twenty and a sophomore at Towson. And I had it this morning again at the motel—the first time in years.” She rolls her eyes in a zany way.
Joe and Ted are making a noisy second trek over the floor plan now. Ted’s unscrolling some old blueprints he’s kept squirreled away. They will soon barge into Phyllis’s and my little séance.
“I think that feeling’s natural, Phyllis, and I think you and Joe take care of each other just fine.” I peek to see if the orienteers are here yet. I hear them tromping over the defunct floor furnace, talking importantly about the attic.
Phyllis shakes her head and smiles a beatified smile. “The trick’s changing the water to wine, isn’t it?”
I have no idea what this might mean, though I give her a lawyerly-brotherly look that says this competition’s over. I could even give her a pat on her plump shoulder, except she’d get wary. “Phyllis, look,” I say. “People think there’re just two ways for things to go. A worked-out way and a not-worked-out way. But I think most things start one way, then we steer them where we want them to go. And no matter how you feel at the time you buy a house—even if you don’t buy this one or don’t buy one from me at all—you’re going to have to—“
And then our séance is over. Ted and Joe come trooping back down the hall from where they’ve decided not to take a cobwebby tour up the “disappearing” stairway to eyeball some metal rafter gussets Ted installed when Hurricane Lulu passed by in ’58, blowing hay straw through tree trunks, moving yachts miles inland and leveling grander houses than Ted’s. It’s too hot upstairs.
“God’s in the details,” one of the new best friends observes. But adds, “Or is it the devil?”
Phyllis looks peacefully at the entry, into which the two of them go first one way and then the other before locating us in the l/r. Ted, coming into view with his blueprints, looks to my estimation satisfied with everything. Joe, in his immature goatee, his vulgar shorts and Potters Do It With Their Fingers shirt, seems on the verge of some form of hysteria.
“I’ve seen enough,” Joe shouts like a railroad conductor, taking a quick estimation of the living room as if he’d never seen it in his life. He jams his thick knuckles together in satisfaction. “I can make up my mind on what I’ve seen.”
“Okay,” I say. “We’ll take a drive, then.” (Code for: We’ll go to breakfast and write up a full-price offer and be back in an hour.) I give Ted Houlihan an assuring nod. Unexpectedly he’s proved a key player in an ad hoc divide-and-conquer scheme. His memories, his poor dead wife, his faulty cojones, his Milquetoast Fred Waring soft-shoe worldview and casual attire, are first-rate selling tools. He could be a realtor.
“This place won’t stay on the market long,” Joe shouts to anyone in the neighborhood who’s interested. He swivels around and starts for the front door in some kind of beehive panic.
“Well, we’ll see,” Ted Houlihan says, and gives me and Phyllis a doubtful smile, scrolling his blueprints tighter. “I know that place across the fence disturbs you, Mrs. Markham. But I’ve always felt it made the whole neighborhood safer and more cohesive. It’s not much different from having AT & T or RCA, if you get what I mean.”
“I understand,” Phyllis says, unmoved.
Joe is already through the front door, down the steps and out onto the lawn, scoping out the roofline, the fascial boards, the soffits, his hair-framed mouth gaped open as he searches for sags in the ridgeboard or ice damage under the eaves. Possibly it is manic-depression medicine that causes his lips to be so red. Joe, I think, needs a bit of tending to.
I find a Frank Bascombe, Realtor Associate card in my windbreaker pocket and slip it onto the umbrella stand outside the living-room door, where I’ve spent the last ten minutes keeping Phyllis in the corral.
“We’ll be in touch,” I say to Ted. (More code. Less specific.)
“Yes, indeed,” Ted says, smiling warmly.
And then out Phyllis goes, hips swaying, sandals clicking, shaking Ted’s little hand on the fly and saying something about its being a lovely house and a pity he has to sell it, but heading right out to where Joe’s trying to get a clear bead on things through whatever fog it’s his bewildered lot to see through.
“They’ll never buy it,” Ted says gamely as I head toward the door. His is not disappointment but possibly misplaced satisfaction at having foreign elements turned away, permitting a brief retreat into the comfortable bittersweet domesticity that’s still his. Joe out the door would be a relief for anyone.
“I can’t tell, Ted,” I say. “You don’t know what other people will do. If I did, I’d be in another line of work.”
“It’d be nice to think that the place was valuable to others. I’d feel good about that. There’s not a lot of corroboration there for us anymore.”
“Not what we’d like. But that’s my part in this.” Phyllis and Joe are standing beside my car, looking at the house as though it were an ocean liner just casting off for open seas. “Just don’t underestimate your own house, Ted,” I say, and once again grab his little hard-biscuit hand and give it an affirming shake. I take a last whiff of gas leak. (I’ll hear Joe out on this subject inside of five minutes.) “Don’t be surprised if I come back with an offer this morning. They won’t see a house as good as yours, and I mean to make that clear as Christmas.”
“A guy once climbed over the fence while I was out back sacking leaves,” Ted says. “Susan and I took him inside, gave him some coffee and an egg salad sandwich. Turned out he was an alderman from West Orange. He’d just gotten in over his head. But he ended up helping me bag leaves for an hour, then going back over. We got a Christmas card from him for a while.”
“He’s probably back in politics,” I say, happy Ted has spared Phyllis this anecdote.
“Probably.”
“We’ll be in touch.”
“I’ll be right here,” Ted says. He closes the front door behind me.
Inside the car, the Markhams seem to want to get rid of me as fast as possible, and, more important, neither one makes a peep about an offer.
As we’re pulling out the drive we all notice another realtor’s car slowing to a stop, a young couple front and back—the woman videotaping the Houlihan place through the passenger window. The driver’s-side sign on the big shiny Buick door says BUY AND LARGE REALTY—Freehold, NJ.
“This place’ll be history by sundown,” Joe says flatly, seated beside me, his get-up-and-go oddly got-up-and-gone. No mention of any gas odor. Phyllis has had no real chance to browbeat him, but a look can raze cities.
“Could be,” I say, staring knives at the BUY AND LARGE Buick. Ted Houlihan may have already reneged on our exclusive, and I’m tempted to step out and explain some things to everybody involved. Though the sight of competing buyers could put a special, urgent onus to act on Phyllis and Joe, who watch these new people in disapproving silence as I drive us back down Charity Street.
On the way to Route 1, Phyllis—who has now put on dark glasses and looks like a diva—suddenly insists I drive them “around” so she can see the prison. Consequently, I negotiate us back through the less nice, bordering neighborhoods, curve in behind a new Sheraton and a big Episcopal church with a wide, empty parking lot, then merge out onto Route 1 north of Penns Neck, where, a half mile down the road in what looks like a mowed hayfield, there sits, three hundred yards back, a complex of low, indistinct flat-green buildings fenced all around and refenced closer in, which altogether constitutes the offending “big house.” We can see basketball backboards, a baseball diamond, several fenced and lighted tennis courts, a high-dive platform over what might very well be an Olympic-size pool, some paved and winding “reflection paths” leading out into open stretches of field where pairs of men—some apparently elderly and limping—are strolling and chatting and wearing street clothes instead of prison monkey garb. There’s also, apparently for atmosphere, a large flock of Canada geese milling
and nosing around a flat, ovoid pond.
I, naturally, have passed this place incalculable times but have paid it only the briefest attention (which is what the prison planners expected, the whole shebang as unremarkable as a golf course). Though looked at now, a grassy, summery compound with substantial trees ranked beyond its boundaries, where an inmate can do any damn thing he wants but leave—read a book, watch color TV, think about the future—and where one’s debts to society can be unobtrusively retired in a year or two, it seems like a place anyone might be glad to pause just to get things sorted out and cut through the crap.
“It looks like some goddamn junior college,” Joe Markham says, still talking in the higher decibels but seeming calmer now. We’re stopped on the opposite shoulder, with traffic booming past, and are rubbernecking the fence and the official silver-and-black sign that reads: N.J. MEN’S FACILITY—A MINIMUM SECURITY ENVIRONMENT, behind which New Jersey, American and Penal System flags all rustle on separate poles in the faint, damp breezes. There’s no guardhouse here, no razor wire, no electric fences, no watchtowers with burp guns, stun grenades, searchlights, no leg-chewing canines— just a discreet automatic gate with a discreet speaker box and a small security camera on a post. No biggie.
“It doesn’t look that bad, does it?” I say.
“Where’s our house from here?” Joe says, still loudly, leaning to see across me.
We study the row of big trees which is Penns Neck, the Houlihan house on Charity Street invisible within.
